'Eyes in the sky' for homeland security

Super Blimps
While ordinary airships operate about 1,500 feet above the ground and can cruise at about 5,000 feet maximum, researchers at Purdue University are looking at creating an airship intended to fly about 65,000 feet, well above commercial airliner traffic. 

These super blimps would have better surveillance capabilities than satellites because of their proximity to the ground and because they would be unmanned they could remain in operation for up to a year, the Purdue researchers said.  But fuel and durability of the airship’s “skin” are still engineering hurdles, the researchers acknowledged. The work is being funded by the Air Force.

Although no design for the blimps has been finalized, the researchers say it may be up to 900 feet long, that’s about four times the length of the Goodyear blimp.

The High Altitude Stratsopheric Airship is a similar project being funded by the Defense Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  That ship also is designed to fly at 65,000 and provide a high level, stable surveillance platform.  One proposed use for the airship is to monitor the millions of cargo containers --  only a fraction are actually inspected -- that arrive at U.S. ports each year.  The researchers say their blimp could be outfitted with high tech sensors to scan the containers before they touch land. 

Border hawks and cyberbugs
Fed up with federal inaction along the Arizona-Mexico border and fueled by little more than good ol’ American ingenuity, Glenn Spenser, president of the American Border Patrol group, a private watchdog group, sought to create an unmanned aerial vehicle that was cost effective, reliable and productive.   The result was Border Hawk I, built on little more than a model airplane with 10-foot wingspan and stuffed with off-the-shelf high tech devices and greased with a little homegrown computer programming.

Border Hawk carried a GPS guidance device and was controlled with a joy stick operated from a mobile van that served as the airplane’s command center.  The plane flew using custom designed software, Spenser said.  In addition it had a camera with a custom designed pan and tilt system capable of transmitting real time color and night time imagery up to three miles away.  Spenser said the video was recorded on a TiVo device and could be sent out over the Internet and forwarded to the Border Patrol and all at a cost of about $40,000. 

Last year the U.S. Border Patrol experimented with unmanned aerial vehicles, a project that cost millions and was not slated to be repeated when the government launched its big border crackdown in March. The agency is not using them at the moment.

But Spenser told MSNBC.com that Border Hawk II is now in operation.  “We’re going to be putting everything from Border Hawk I into a Cessna and we’re putting a five watt transmitter in that with a 30 mile radius,” he said, noting that the transmitter has been cleared with government officials. 

“The idea here is that we want to show the public what our government could be doing,” Spenser said of his group’s project.  “We continue to embarrass [the government] and they should be embarrassed,” he said.  “We’re a little thorn in their side down there because we continue to demonstrate how this job could be done.”

Meanwhile, the Charles County Sheriff’s office in Maryland has used a small unmanned flying device dubbed the “CyberBug” for crowd control and surveillance.

The CyberBug looks like a model airplane married to a kite and is controlled by a joy-stick type device.  It can be carried in the truck of a squad car and is launched on its way by literally tossing it into the sky.  From there the joystick controller takes over and its camera signal is sent in real-time back to a laptop computer.

The sheriff’s office used the device for two 30-minute flights on April 17^th to monitor the annual “Blessing of the Bikes” event at the Charles County Fairgrounds, which officials said was attended by some 8,000 people. 

“I was quite impressed with how easy it was launch and how well it monitored the area,” said Lt. Chris Becker, commander, Homeland Security and Intelligence for the Charles County Sheriff’s department.  “Besides crowd and traffic control, I see law enforcement using the CyberBug in a multitude of applications, especially when it comes to crime fighting and homeland security.”

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